


Water?

by ialpiriel



Series: The Doofus Noodle Gets Up To Shit [8]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Character Death, Character Is What You Are In The Dark, Dehydration, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 20:17:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life in the desert hinges on one thing: water. Six keeps living, but ain't everyone knows how to plan for running dry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water?

It’s been five days in This Goddamn Desert, and she lost the road a long time ago. All she knows is to head east until she hits a river, and unless she made a major navigational error, or her compass has gone to shit, she’s mostly kept up with that. The hand-drawn map says she’s still on the right path–-the weird-shaped rock she’s got drawn in is visible in the distance, so she can’t be too far off. Map’s getting smudged, from her sweaty hands and sweaty breast pocket and sweaty everything. Needs recopied soon. Onto something more waterproof. Maybe just with one of them fancy pre-War colored pencils. Those things don’t smear, no matter how hard you try.

She’s walked this way before; it’s hotter and blander, but it’s faster than taking the old highway down and around. Quiet out here, too, and flat, so she can see anything coming from miles off.

There’s no one out here though.

She saw a gecko, once. That had been a pretty exciting day.

There’s people junk out here, now, though, which isn’t a good sign. Ain’t never people junk out this way. Nothing to draw people. Not a caravan road. Not any water. No ruins, no reliable game, and only one single fuckin’ saguaro to break up the rocks and the sand and the dirt.

People junk-–means people shedding shit as they walk, which means people who are probably dead out here.

Just what she needs.

Dry-mummified corpses.

The kettle’s what gets her laughing. ‘S a fancy thing. Yarders don’t have kettles. Hell, most of the people in the city didn’t have kettles. Fuckin’…rich people and their weird old-world made-for-one-thing appliances.

It’s an old one, rusty and half-buried. Means there’s been a long time since these people came by. Wind ain’t bad out here, so it musta been a long time for it to get half-covered.

Thirty feet past the kettle is a bone, sticking up out of the sand. Animal–-gecko, probably, guessing by the size and shape. Not human. Not big enough to be deathclaw. Wrong shape for a pack brahmin, too big for a dog.

She keeps walking. Got a deadline, got four bottles of water, got just enough food to last the week if she skimps. Only have to starve once to learn.

Through the haze, she thinks she can see something besides the weird-shaped rock she has memorialized on her sweaty, wrinkly map. Just a bump. Like a corpse that’s bundled over. Or a rock. A cart, 7/8 of it buried in the sand? A very large soup pot?

It’s a half hour–-eight more bones, something that’s definitely a soup pot, a child’s doll, a pile of silverware that she stops to pick through-–before she reaches the bump.

It’s a tent.

Or, it could be a tent, if it was aboveground. As it is, it’s a shelter sunk into the ground, a sort of cave dug out inside it.

There’s someone curled up inside it, in the middle of the “floor”. They’re moving like they’re breathing, but it’s slow and shallow.

She has a moment where she wishes they were dead, that she could strip their body of everything useful and go on her way, let the coyotes pick over the flesh on their corpse.

Then she figures she oughta be kind.

“Hey,” she rasps. She hasn’t drunk for an hour, and the dust is drying her out. She clears her throat and tries again. “Hey. You still here? How far you gone?”

“Water?” he asks.

Well, that’s an answer in itself.

“You have water?” he asks.

She has four bottles. Technically, she could make the waypoint on three, but that’s pushing it, and this guy needs more than a single bottle of water, especially if he’s gonna try to move on.

He dies here, whether she gives him water or not.

Mam held her on her lap, when she was real little, not more’n knee-height, and had brushed her hair and sang her songs and told her, over and over and over again, “Character is what y’ are in the dark.”

She’d been halfway from knee-height to hip-height by the time she thought to ask what that meant.

She thinks through what she has in her pack.

Best she’s got is enough Med-X to kill the pain.

He ain’t gonna last long anyway.

“Hey,” she says again, touches his shoulder. He shakes under her hand, and she rolls him onto his back.

He stares up at her with unseeing eyes.

“Water?” he asks.

“Water,” she agrees, and presses the bottle into his hands. She helps him bring it to his mouth to drink.

She takes a deep breath, and reaches for the syringe.


End file.
